AHRC Digital Transformations Moot

Last Monday the project attended the AHRC-moot on Digital Transformations, held at the Mermaid Conference Centre in London. Humphrey Southall represented Old Maps Online and presented a joint display entitled 'Old Maps and the Spatial turn'. Alongside Old Maps Online, this exhibition included Kate Jones (University of Portsmouth) who was introducing the new Bomb Sight website/mobile app (another JISC funded project), Kimberly Kowal (British Library and a member of our steering group) who presented the BL Georeferencer project on which they collaborated with Klokan Technologies and Leif Isaksen (University of Southampton) who was presenting the Pelagios project which links together resources about the ancient world via a gazetteer of ancient places and YAMA a historical map annotator. There was also a display about the Georeferencer Metadata Hub from Klokan.

copyright © 2000 Cartography Associates.

The aim of this joint exhibition was to focus attention on projects working to embed historical maps into modern digital scholarship and exploit the significant general interest there is in old maps. The old map example here was published by Edward Stanford of London in 1901 and shows South East London.

For further information about the day, including a downloadable PDF of the programme see the AHRC website: http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/Funding-Opportunities/Research-funding/Themes/Digital-Transformations/Pages/Digital-Transformations-Moot.aspx

Focus on the Collections: The National Library of Scotland

The next in our series of more in-depth posts about particular collections is focused on the National Library of Scotland's map collection.

The first thing to note about this library is that it has the largest selection of on-line digital maps in the UK with over 44,000 accessible high-resolution images within an online map library in the "Digital resources" section of their institutional website. Of course this is only a small proportion in terms of their total collection of paper maps, but none-the-less this quantity of digital images is in itself a substantial achievement in the digital archives world and identifies the National Library of Scotland as a leading-light in this digital community. The majority of the collection is understandably focussed on Scotland, although there are maps covering the whole of Great Britain included as well.

(c) National Library of Scotland

Within the Library catalogue the maps are grouped by their type and date and are currently divided into those that are georeferenced and those that are not. The maps accessible via Old Maps Online range in date from the early nineteenth Century through into the twentieth Century and all have co-ordinates associated with them. This example is an excerpt from a map entitled 'Lanarkshire, Sheet VI' which  was published in 1865 and shows a much smaller Glasgow than currently exists, but at the same time it also indicates that central areas in the city have been fairly densely populated for over 150 years.

The Library offers the user the option to purchase digital images or printouts of its online maps from them, something many users appreciate. More than this though this library offers the user different ways in which they can browse and access their maps through a range of cutting-edge map technologies. These include a zoomable maps and gazetteer viewer, KlokanTechnologies Georeferencer software allowing users to help add co-ordinates to yet more maps (more on this in the British Library post), a historical maps API which allows users to incorporate material from the Library into their own websites, overlay technology which lets users place old maps on top of new ones, a project which provides mapping tools for historians and of course they also participate in our Old Maps Online project. This extensive repertoire of software applications highlights the commitment of the National Library of Scotland to making their map material available to users in new and interesting ways.

With thanks to Chris Fleet, Senior Map Curator at the 
National Library of Scotland, for his assistance with this post

Old Maps Online - so what?

JISC, who funded Old Maps Online, have requested that we review the success of our project, and how it can be sustained. Here we explore the ways our project has added value.

First and foremost we think we have achieved what we set out to do: creating an online search facility which is easy to use, is full of useful content and links to a wide variety of host institutions. There are a number of different ways we consider the project unique in its success;

• We have created and implemented new MapRank Search software suitable for hosting material from a myriad of institutions
• We have persuaded a range of different digital map libraries from around the world to participate
• We have included maps covering all parts of the whole world
• We have helped some UK libraries add geographical metadata to their digital map images
• We have encouraged all libraries holding maps to think about their metadata in a geographical context
• We have provided a single entry point for searching maps of the same geographical location without the need to know which library holds the actual map
• We have clustered metadata for use in a new way

Of course some of our success is hard to quantify precisely because we are providing an open-access resource. We can look at web usage analysis and count numbers using the website. We can report the stir of positive interest we created when we launched back in February on social networking sites such as Twitter. We can hypothesize that the involvement of so many different host institutions is because we are offering a service which is both open-access for users and free to participate for contributors.

However, we feel that even more than that we have started to influence how libraries think about their geographical holdings. Institutions are beginning to consider how geographical content within their collections can best be made findable and searchable. They are raising questions about the best way to make this content available to their users. Many more institutions have contacted us than are currently contributing saying they would have liked to participate, but that their material as yet does not have a geographical element to its metadata and unfortunately for both them and us it will not be added in time to be included before the end of the current funding for Old Maps Online.

We have proposed a concept and proved it works -- but  this is just one way in which enriched metadata can be used in new ways to simplify online searching.